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Wednesday, February 17, 2016

New Quilty Box and Free Quilt Pattern!

I just received my Quilty Box for February and it really is like getting a surprise gift in the mail! I love opening up the box and checking out the fun materials and challenging myself to make something quickly and easily with the supplies.

This month I received a Kona Roll Up of white and black 2 1/2 inch strips so I decided to piece a funky white and black quilt...except I was all out of white background fabric!

I ended up using Island Batik Cherry and Snowcone which creates a really funky background. While this quilt looks pretty complicated, the piecing is super easy, especially when using precut strips.

Do you like piecing with precuts, or do you prefer cutting from yardage? Have you ever designed a quilt on graph paper entirely yourself? It's lots of fun and very easy to do, and best of all, you end up with a beautiful, unique quilt that's entirely your creation!

5 comments:

I do like using precuts, but not when they're all the same fabric, I'd rather buy yardage and cut it myself - it costs less and doesn't take long. Having said that I recently made blocks using a jelly roll and they are all just a bit big and now need trimming because the jelly roll strips weren't 2 1/2 inches, the were 2 3/8.

Leah, I'm actually scared to use precuts because you really can't prewash them without turning them into a shriveled, unraveled mess. Can they be used in bed quilts, and if so, what happens when they get sewn to pre-washed fabric and then the finished quilt gets put in the washer? I'm thinking the precut fabrics would shrink up terribly, while the prewashed fabrics would not...which just sounds like a train wreck. I hope someone can enlighten me, because when I got my Quilty Box this month, I just went 'oh no.' Should I only use the precuts in wall quilts? Ay-yi-yi.

I have honestly struggled with these exact same worries with precuts myself Linda! Since most Quilty Boxes include some sort of precut fabric, I've just had to start playing with them to see what happens.

So far, I don't find that they shrink that badly after completion, and they don't react too weirdly with prewashed fabrics. One thing I've been doing is mostly mixing precuts with more precuts so the entire quilt is consistently unwashed fabric and will react the same.

However, with this Infinity Knot quilt, I had batiks so I absolutely prewashed that fabric first. It will be interesting to see what happens to it after quilting and washing.

With most of this stuff I try to remember what the goal of the quilt is - to have fun, to experiment, to use the fabric quickly and not get obsessive about the results. Is this a show quilt? Nope? Then it really doesn't matter if the fabrics get mixed prewashed and not and some unique shrinkage happens!

Leah, that is reassuring, because I thought it was just me. My bed quilts are made for donation to a women's and children's shelter, so I have to make sure they are going to wash well. So, I think what I'll do is test a pre-wash/pre-cut combo for my baby granddaughter, which means I can keep it small and wash it repeatedly to see what will happen to it. (I just need to get over the 'This may be a total waste of time and fabric' attitude--and I will, because it will be worth the time and fabric just to know what to expect for my donation quilts.) Thanks so much!

A Little Advice from Leah:

Stop stressing about perfection. Perfection does not exist past 25 inches! Actually, make that 5 inches.

Don't be afraid of your tension dial - it was put there for a reason.

Quilt because it makes you happy, not because you need to "finish this damn quilt!"

If you've never quilted before and are waiting for that perfect day when the kids are grown or you're retired, STOP WAITING! Today is the day, now is the time, get off your butt and do it!

Eat, Quilt, Sleep, Repeat.

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